Anand says Global Affairs cuts won’t harm consular access

A Chinese paramilitary police officer rides a bicycle past the Canadian Embassy in Beijing, Saturday, Sept. 25, 2021. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

OTTAWA — Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand says budget cuts at Global Affairs Canada won’t affect the ability of Canadians in trouble abroad to get help from embassies.

“I’m confident that these reductions will have no impact on the services on which Canadians rely while abroad,” Anand testified Thursday to the House foreign affairs committee.

This month’s budget included a $561 million cut to the department’s budget next year, which increases to a $1.1 billion cut two years later. It said GAC would be “revamping emergency preparedness and modernizing consular services” to cut costs.

Earlier this year, bureaucrats warned Anand that deteriorating stability worldwide and an increase in travel are causing a massive expansion in the work required to protect Canadians abroad, citing costly evacuations from the Middle East, Sudan and Haiti.

In the introductory binder prepared for Anand when she took on the portfolio in May, Global Affairs Canada said the number of evacuations it has staged to extract Canadians from crisis situations abroad has increased 3.4 times in the past five years.

The binder suggested “calibrating and managing expectations of service delivery” for consular cases that can involve anything from severe illnesses and child abductions to lost passports.

On Thursday, GAC’s chief financial officer testified that the budget cuts will affect consular services.

“We did have to make some reductions to our consular program,” Shirley Carruthers said. “Some of our services will be moved to an online portal.”

She did not offer a timeline for that shift.

“For those more complex cases that we have, they’ll continue to receive in-person support,” Carruthers added. “The reductions that we have put forward with respect to our consular program are in the spirit of modernizing how we actually deliver our services.”

Anand told MPs that the cuts “will not impact the government’s ability to diversify its trading partners and bring more investment” to Canada. That could suggest the cutbacks will disproportionally hit branches that don’t have an economic focus.

“Our network of diplomatic missions abroad has received clear instructions to deploy all necessary resources to advance trade diversification and economic diplomacy,” she said Thursday.

The budget set aside $1.7 billion for measures to make Canada more competitive in trade, including trade missions.

“When we were undertaking the exercise to identify reductions within the department, it was necessary for us to look across all of our business lines,” Carruthers said.

She said the department looked at “what we needed, what we could reduce … the areas where we could find efficiencies and were of lesser value to the department.”

Carruthers said the department will need to cut jobs, including some of the roughly 92 per cent of the department’s staff she said are classified as “indeterminate employees.”

The budget said the government is looking to consolidate its foreign service footprint abroad. That could mean combining trade offices, consulates and even ambassadorial residences into single facilities.

The budget said that could involve “co-locating some offices with allies where appropriate,” or purchasing buildings that Canada has leased abroad.

Anand said that reviewing Canada’s diplomatic footprint is a regular process.

“With every new government, with every set of new foreign policy priorities, there is also a necessity to readjust the places of focus, especially in terms of missions,” she said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 28, 2025.

Dylan Robertson, The Canadian Press